Greenwald on Royalty

Glenn Greenwald writes with his usual acuity and acerbity today as a salutes Jenna Bush Hager on her reception into full adult membership in the pool of shared DNA that is the American ruling class. "We did a national search and imagine our surprise when she turned out to be just the right person for the job," someone probably did not say, but just might have.

Greenwald is catching predictable flac for not mentioning Demo aristos (in this week of the Ted Kennnedy funeral), but this criticism misses his particular point. That is: Greenwald's favorite aristos are those who fulminate against affirmative action and who cluck over the ascent of Sandra Sotomayer because someone may have (gasp!) given her a helping hand along the way.

He's dead on of course, but he might have mentioned one other luminary whom the Chosen might have welcomed into their own circle of merit. That would be Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who simply cannot bear the thought that he might have made it to the top through anything other than his own slash and grab.

But I think I'd generalize the point. Rightly understood, I think it is fair to say that we are all beneficiaries of some kind of affirmative action: the height gene, the gene that makes us look like Leonardo di Caprio, to say nothing of loving parents, a warm-hearted middle-school teacher, a kindly and avuncular old geezer who took a shine to us while we carried his golf bag. The unseemly part may be not (only) the blindness to the fact that being a Bush, a Kennedy, a McCain, a Russert, a Rockefeller, a Bayh, but that we are all just damn lucky to be as well off as we are, and to be prepared to show a little humility about all the bounty that has been showered upon us.

Update: On rereading, I realize that this comes out all wrong, as if I intended to be kind and forgiving to the insiders in the DNA club. I meant nothing of the sort: taken as a whole, they are mostly preening, smug and self-satisfied.

Stop Reading This Right Now

If you don't have Glenn Greenwald on your A-list, stop reading this right now and go here. For a taste, here's Glenn on all those "Liberal Hawks" who are telling Slate what they got wrong:

[N]ot a single one of them appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole disaster: The U.S. should not -- and has no right to -- invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven't attacked or even threatened to attack us. None of them say: "Wars that aren't directly in response to an actual or imminent attack shouldn't be commenced because doing so leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings for no justifiable reason." Not even the most regretful war advocate seems to have reached that conclusion.

As long as the root premises of our endless war-fighting remain firmly in place, there will be many more Iraqs, "justified" by similar or only marginally different objectives. We need to invade to remove a Bad Government, or stop a civil religious or ethnic war, or prevent mistreatment by other ruling factions of their citizens, etc. etc. -- as though we possess the ability and are blessed with sufficiently magnanimous, selfless political leaders to accomplish any of those lofty goals with military invasions of other countries.

Nothing to add, your honor.

Iranians v. Navy Nukes, and the Boy Who Cried Wolf

The Iranian boat and the US fighting vessel?--Underbelly's military correspondent smelled "Gulf of Tonkin" from the get-go. "Yeah," he snarled in an email that I stamped in at 9:15 a.m. Monday. "Right: you normally play chicken with a destroyer armed with nukes?" I'm not informed enough to contradict him--but comes now the formidable Glenn Greenwald who makes a powerful (if not completely slam-dunk) case that the report was, indeed, a fake (link). Looks to me like Greenwald has the best of it, but consider this possibility: these guys have, at the very least, a real "cry wolf" problem--that is, they've lied so often, and about so much, that we just naturally assume they are lying now.

Remember the BBC in World War II--when they started reporting Allied victories, people believed them because they had conscientiously reported allied defeats.

Somebody Hold My Coat

I caught C-Span’s presentation of a Cato Institute talk by Glenn Greenwald on wireless wiretaps, etc., with commentary by Lee Casey (link). For those who aren’t acquainted with Greenwald, this is a fine introduction to a guy who I think is a national treasure—one of the most intelligent and effective critics of the Bush administration’s near-unprecedented abuses of power. Casey, is worth your time also; he offers about as effective a rebuttal as you are likely to get (Casey begins at about 42:00, declaring that he has “no desire to crush the testicles of children”).

I won’t trouble myself to undertake a comprehensive postmortem but I do want to zero in on a curious aspect of Casey’s response. Per Casey, Greenwald charges the Bush with “Manichaeanism”—defined by Casey as

the proposition that the world cannot be understood as black or white or good or evil but only in comforting shades of grey…

Casey adds that this cleavage

has been one of the left’s fundamental articles of faith throughout much of the postwar period and arguably, before--one can I think failrly characterize many if not most of the right-left disputes of the last half century as a battle over this very proposition’s validity.

Casey doesn’t seem to deny that Bush is a Manichaean; indeed, Casey’s only caution seems to be that Bush isn’t Manichaean enough. Of course I agree; I also think his charge is on the whole a fair cop against Greenwald, and I think he is more right than wrong in his characterization of modern political conflict.

But focus on “comforting,” as in “comforting shades of grey.” I suspect that right here we have a key to some of the fundamental discontinuities in world-view that make these debates so aggravating.

I’m a shades-of-grey guy myself—yes sir, mighty proud to say it; you can almost put that down in black and white. But “comforting”? Well, I suppose it is “comforting” in a sense to tell yourself that you’re trying to get things right, that you’re struggling for intellectual honesty, that you’re trying to be fair to all points of view. And I admit that thinking about shades of grey can put me to sleep at night—but I suspect this has less to do with “comfort” than with sheer exhaustion.

But in a more general sense, the point about “shades of grey” is precisely that they are not comforting. Wasn’t it Voltaire who said (and wasn’t it about Frederick the Great) that “I wish I was as certain of anything as he is of everything”--? I know about waffling liberals; I know the only things in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead possums. I know there is nothing more exasperating than on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand. I dream of being a Manichaean; I’m no closer fulfilling that wish than I am to a Parisian vacation with Glen Close. Say that I find grey “comforting” and I say – Oh, I wish.

There’s a murky underside to this shades-of-grey disposition, of course. That is: I want to be recognized for my heroic sense of doubt—no, not recognized saluted and honored and cherished by a beleagured multitude. To have my world-view dismissed as `comforting—argh, somebody hold my coat!

The whole program is available at the Cato link above. It is due to be rebroadcast on C-Span Monday, August 26, 6:30 a.m. and next Saturday, September 1, at 4:30 p.m. (both est).

Use a Donkey, Go to Jail

Running around and trying to put out a midterm, so not able to write about stuff I’d like to write about. Left to link to other good stuff.

Like the ever-dependable Patrick Kurp, though I am not quite certain what moral I should draw from this piece

Or Patrick Lang, speaking on a subject that he really knows something about (clarification: I think Lang almost always knows whereof he speaks; I wish others would profit from his example).

Or Glenn Greenwald, who just keeps getting better and better (put up with the Salon gateway: not all that burdensome, and worth it).

Or Elizabeth Warren on another tsunami.

Or this, which beggars description. But here’s a teaser:

He was also charged with damage to a mini-bar in the room, but this charge was later dropped when the defendant said that it was the donkey who caused that damage.

Truth May Be Stranger Than Fiction But It's No More Durable

The indefatigable Glenn Greenwald has a characteristically comprehensive post up at slate, demolishing the fakery behind a supposed quotation from Abraham Lincoln (see also Carpetbagger and others). Here’s what Lincoln did not say:

Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.

Sound familiar? No surprise, it has been galumphing around the conservative noise machine for some time now. Frank Gaffney used it as an epigraph for his latest column in the Washington Times. It was still up at the website as of 518 pm Pacific time today (Feb. 14 2007). This last is a scandal in itself, because as Greenwald has documented, the Times has been notified—and apparently Gaffney has acknowledged—that the quotation is a total fabrication, start to finish. Greenwald explains:

This "quote" was first attributed to Lincoln by J. Michael Waller in Insight Magazine, in a 2003 article revealingly entitled: Democrats Usher in an Age of Treason. But as Waller himself now admits, the quote attributed to Lincoln is completely fraudulent. Waller wrote in an e-mail to FactCheck.org (h/t William Wolfrum):

The supposed quote in question is not a quote at all, and I never intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead sentence in the article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a quote by incorrectly inserting quotation marks.

It was Waller, in The Washington Times' Insight Magazine, urging that anti-war Congressmen be hanged -- not Abraham Lincoln.

There’s an admirable review of the whole business at Factcheck, including also a discussion of the question whether Lincoln ever said anything like this (hint: no).

Factcheck does leave one curious fact in evidence but uncommented-on. Specifically, they quote an email from Waller:

Oddly, you are the first to question me about this . I'm surprised it has been repeated as often as you say. My editors at the time didn't think it was necessary to run a correction in the following issue of the magazine.

But per Factcheck, the article first appeared on December 23, 2003. The Insight piece broke on August 25, 2006. Factcheck recounts that the quote was used in a National Press Club Speech on May 24, 2006, as a slam against Democratic Congressman John Murtha, then a candidate for reelection. I wonder if Waller ever troubled himself to consider blowing the whistle on himself? Or why his editors “didn’t think it was necessary to run a correction”—until, that is, Factcheck showed up at their door with the goods.

The fabricated Lincoln quote is only one of a near-infinite number of bogus attributions that drift around the political arena, and to be fair, not all generate from the right. Coincidentally just lately, I was tracking down the origins of the famous (alleged) “Chief Seattle” speech:

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of the Earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clear and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

Heady stuff, but indisputably bogus. It was written by one Ted Perry, apparently then at the University of Texas, now at Middlebury College in Vermont. The Website of the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle (linked from Snopes, supra) explains:

In the winter of 1971/72, Ted Perry, a screenwriter working for the Southern Baptist Convention's Radio and Television Commission, used Chief Seattle's speech as a model for the script of a film on ecology called _Home_. The film's producer wanted to show a distinguished American Indian chief delivering a statement of concern for the environment, so Perry wove such wonderful lines as "The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth" among pieces of Chief Seattle's 1854 oration. Perry expected to be given credit for writing this film script, but he made the mistake of including the Chief's name in his text. According to Perry, the producer didn't credit his screen writer because he thought the film might seem more authentic without a "written by" credit.

Note some common themes here: in each case the writer acknowledges the writing, but says the misattribution wasn’t really his fault. But in each case, the bogosity seems to take on a life of his own.

Crap Detector Footnote: In each case, there are clues that ought to give the reader grounds for skepticism. “Chief Seattle” (Perry) says:

I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train.

In fact, there are no buffalo anywhere near Seattle, and were not in Chief Seattle’s time. Meanwhile, Lincoln warns us against “saboteurs.” But as “fuyura” at Carpetbagger points out, there is no documented use of the word “saboteurs” in English before 1918.